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Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone take Thrun's basic stats course? Is it the same one that Udacity offered to the public? I'm bothered by this paragraph: "I think Thrun's elite background led him down a garden path. Any San Jose State professor who had taught an introduction to statistics could have told him that many (most?) of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills and would "hate math." They are not Stanford students."

San Jose State is a reputable university with many graduates doing well in the valley. The statement that "many of his students would not have basic arithmetic skills" sounds shocking.

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At SJSU, 33% of the incoming freshmen need remedial math and 49% need remedial English. It's like that in most of the Cal State schools.

http://www.calstate.edu/pa/clips2007/march/14march/unprep.sh...

at every school in the world, there are kids that need help with math. Even at MIT there will be some kids that have been memorizing formulas... that's simply because that's how they've been taught for their entire life. Then they hit a wall and they're really in trouble.

Thrun can't teach kids that have, for a decade, been learning how to memorize crap. How many math teachers in high school and middle school can prove the pythagorean theorem? That should be the survey that we worry about.

Thrun should be making courses for fifth graders also if he wants to teach 20 year olds intro to stat.

Then the education system has a serious problem. Kids respond to incentives. Memorizing formulas would work only if students can get by homework and exams with rote memorization. We probably should learn from Russia/India/Korea/China, where it's almost impossible for students to pass STEM exams with mere memorization. Not that their exams are hard. It's just that their educators take effort to make sure the problems in their exams encourage intuitive understanding, original thinking, and creative problem solving. Ironically, US universities do exactly that in their classrooms. I wonder why high schools can't just do the same.

Umm.. India? I am from India and rote memorization of math formulas is very evident. I can not speak for other countries but you can pass all the exams till high school using rote using rote memorization and get 100 % too. Only exams like JEE and to an extent AIEEE actually test your ability to apply concepts and that's why they have the smallest selectivity ratio.

It's "shocking" (really?) if you don't realize that those same students without basic arithmetic skills might not graduate, which is not inconsistent at all with the notion that current graduates of that university actually do very well.

Thrun is right if his point is that it would be nice to bring them up to speed in a more thorough way, rather than just weeding them out.

I did realize the survivorship bias. It's shocking to me because if a good university like SJSU would have so many incompetent students, something is wrong with the K12 education system, or something is wrong with American families.

Both.

You state that you are surprised that a school with good graduates has incompetent students, which implies that you wouldn't be surprised if a "bad school" had incompetent students.

However, that logic implies that San Jose State has a lot of selectivity in admissions, which it does not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose_State_University

It accepts over 60% of applicants. And frankly, a mark of a most useful school is one that isn't too selective in admissions and can churn out good graduates.

Welcome to the shocking world of modern public education, where every fourth student[1] at 12th year of education can't read at a basic level.

http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2009/2011455.a...

Not to blow your mind but: Try to challenge some of your med students (or grads) to complete it and see how they do.

I'm not sure what your expected result for this is: that they'll ace it, or do just as badly.

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